


ashes, ashes, dust to dust

by impossiblyincredible



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/F, just exploring the web bond don't mind me, there is so little in the gertrudeagnes tag i'm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:08:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24786727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impossiblyincredible/pseuds/impossiblyincredible
Summary: When Agnes Montague died, Gertrude Robinson noticed.
Relationships: Agnes Montague & Gertrude Robinson, Agnes Montague/Gertrude Robinson
Comments: 4
Kudos: 20





	ashes, ashes, dust to dust

When Agnes Montague died, a great many people noticed. 

When the last signs of life faded from her face and she went still, the small crowd in her flat cleaned things up and disposed of the body with practiced efficiency. They showed no emotion, but they all felt it. That heat that blistered their insides would never again burn as hot, and much in the way of a hot shower, anything cooler suddenly felt unbearably boring. They mourned their messiah, their mission, and their power, but not one person there that day mourned the girl she had tried so desperately to be.

When, just for a second, Jude Perry felt that same feeling (or lack thereof), she knew. She stopped walking, turned to the Welsh forest around her, and screamed; not out of any sort of sadness or love, but out of rage. Rage was easy. Far from central London where it was possible she would interfere with Agnes' plan, she released her crackling, blistering grief onto anything and everything in her path. Though no fire was reported, it would take two years and eight months for any sign of life to reappear there. 

When Agnes Montague died, Gertrude Robinson noticed.

For the rest of her life, she found herself unable to put it into words. Oh, they certainly never knew, Dekker and Keay and the rest, but there were times when she was nearly overcome with the urge to tell them. To tell anyone at all. But Gertrude remembered Emma, the risk she had been and the games she had played, so she kept that connection to herself until the day she died. She never told anyone what it felt like to be in such constant awareness of another person. A day had rarely gone by without her thoughts straying to the woman on the flip side of her mind, and more often than not, Gertrude told herself she was simply being cautious, and that it was wise to keep track of one’s enemies. 

But every now and then, she wondered absently whether this was love. How else could this all-encompassing fascination be described? Was she in love? After much thought, though, she knew that she could never have been, because love requires time, and time was never something Gertrude Robinson and Agnes Montague ever had much of. Their wariness of the spider won over their restless curiosity, so that push-and-pull resigned itself to the back of their minds, the ever-present drumbeat that drives the orchestra. 

When she was younger, Gertrude spent an overwhelming amount of time on her own. She trusted her assistants, kept many contacts, and didn’t go out of her way, exactly, to avoid people, but came close enough that it hardly mattered, so it came as no surprise when the city’s fog started to seep into her flat, or when she found herself dreaming of lighthouses on cold beaches instead of statement-givers. All of that was documented and filed away, but she knew she would never truly lose herself to the Lonely because she knew that she was never truly alone. It became more of a comfort than anything else, to watch the fog recede from her bedroom as she lit a match, thinking of Agnes, and on nights like those, when it was late enough, she gave herself permission to imagine another life for herself. One where it was possible to see Agnes outside of carefully selected rendezvous points, one where it was possible to take her hand.

Did Agnes think of her like this? Though of course, she had suspicions, that was one thing Gertrude could never be sure of. Their meetings, whenever necessary, had been so brief as to be tantalizing, and Agnes had never come close to expressing those sort of sentiments, but then again, neither had Gertrude. It was more than possible that Agnes was looking at the same moon she was, knees pulled up to her chest, thinking of parallel universes where she could hold Gertrude’s hand, and imagining that nearly made Gertrude feel better. Wouldn’t that be something? Both of them, red string tying them together, wanting more.

Gertrude had gotten so used to a pulse that echoed back at her, so when everything was still for the first time in decades, the silence was deafening. Not once did she waver, of course, not to the outside eye. She made sure of it. And if the fireplace in her flat was always hot but not burning, if she always carried matchsticks, if she always turned to fire to dismantle rituals? Well. No one but the spider noticed. 

She spent quite a bit of time alone after Agnes. 

Her habits hardly changed, but she’d lost her anchor, the person keeping her in her own head when she found herself wandering into the fog. A small blessing came to her by the name of one Gerard Keay, but in time he too slipped out of her life. It was possible she’d slipped out of his, but she wasn’t sure, and if she wasn’t sure, then it couldn’t have meant much anyway; she was too entrenched in the archive by that point to notice the difference. But that’s a story you already know.

Those that served other entities would remember her as an unnervingly calculating old woman, someone that followed through on every threat and pulled no punches. That was true. But she’d been young once - she had those sorts of grasping, desperate thoughts that we all have, wanting to run away with the one woman she knew she could never love. That was also true. 

She’d lived a complicated life, and the one relief when she found herself alone was that everything was suddenly blessedly simple. Her world narrowed to the next avatar, the next entity, the next job, and Gertrude disposed of each and every one of them with a ruthlessness that startled even the man pretending to be Elias Bouchard.

She was alone. She was the Archivist. But underneath it all, she was still Gertrude, so in the moments just before she died, shot three times under the building she had tried so hard to burn, she thought of Agnes. And the faintest of smiles touched her lips.

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this fully at 1am on two separate nights and on both of them i listened to "curses" by the crane wives. it's the most agnes song i've ever heard
> 
> come talk to me about tma at archivistim on tumblr!


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